The presidential election isn’t the only nightmare awaiting us in November. Welcome to Congressional Cacophony, a new feature on The Slot about House and Senate races that really, really matter. Suggestions? Pitches? Email us.

In public, everyone says that Thomas Sayers Ellis, 52, formerly of Case Western and Sarah Lawrence, a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop this semester, is brilliant. Even the people who find him off-putting and unprofessional tend to agree. He’s charismatic and surprising, a protest poet, a real…

Ben Carson, a gentle salamander with a tremendously odd manner, isn’t doing so great, campaign-wise, having just cut 50 staff jobs, or about half of his campaign staff. But he does have clean suits, which seems to be quite important to him.

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry says she had a bizarre and threatening encounter with a stranger in Iowa this week, where she’d taken a group of students from her politics class at Wake Forest University to observe the Democratic caucuses.

In preparation for tonight’s caucuses, Ted Cruz has spent nearly three-quarters of the past month campaigning in Iowa. That means his darling wife, Heidi Cruz, has also had to spend a lot of time in Iowa. And according to a source familiar with the Cruz family, Iowa is Heidi Cruz’s own living hell.

One of the things Carly Fiorina learned as CEO of HP was how to make use of available resources. On Wednesday, that meant capitalizing on the presence of little kids while on a campaign stop at the Greater Des Moines botanical garden. No longer were they preschoolers on a field trip—now, without the permission of…

In July 2014, Meagan Taylor and a friend, both black trans women, were traveling through Iowa on their way to Kansas City. They decided to spend a night at the Drury Inn in West Des Moines, Iowa. But instead of making it to Kansas City the next day, Taylor spent the next eight days in a county jail.

During a town hall in Iowa on Monday, an audience member asked our president, Barack Obama, how he felt about Ben Carson’s bizarre proposal that the Department of Education deny federal funding to colleges with “extreme political bias.”